L+R Co-Founder and CEO Speak to PERE
News
L+R Co-Founder Ian Livingstone and Group CEO Cody Bradshaw feature on PERE in an interview outlining the company’s strategy to expand partnerships with institutional investors while retaining its family office DNA. The interview highlights L+R’s recent transformation into a unified platform spanning hotels, commercial real estate, private credit and ventures, as well as the launch of Iconic Hotels & Resorts, its dedicated hospitality operating platform. With a £12bn portfolio and approximately 130 hotels across nine countries, the Group is positioning itself as a specialist investment and operating partner, combining significant co-investment capacity with hands-on operational expertise. The feature also explores L+R’s plans to grow its institutional capital partnerships through co-investment vehicles, joint ventures and bespoke mandates across hospitality and long-income real estate opportunities in Europe and the US. Strengthened by recent senior appointments and international expansion, including a new Madrid office, the Group is targeting further growth while maintaining the entrepreneurial approach that has underpinned its success for nearly four decades.
Since founding family office L+R Group nearly four decades ago, brothers Ian and Richard Livingstone have built up a £12 billion (€13.91 billion; $15.87 billion) property empire to rival some of the biggest specialists in the sector.
The two siblings – who are former owners of the David Clulow chain of opticians and eyewear retailers in the UK – are known to keep a low profile in the property industry, letting their opulent portfolio speak for itself. From their first hotel acquisition in 1999 – the Green Park Hotel on London’s Half Moon Street – notable assets across the globe include the Hotel Excelsior on Venice Lido (pictured), the Fairmont Monte Carlo in Monaco, and Panamá Pacífico, an urban regeneration residential project in Panama.
But L+R is changing tack, as co-founder Ian Livingstone explains to PERE from the group’s London Marylebone headquarters.
Livingstone says it is time to put the firm on the institutional radar. “We want to evolve into a third-party fund manager while retaining our roots as a family office. Building a multibillion-pound global property platform for nearly 40 years has made this ambition possible,” he says. “We are ready to put our capital to work and grow the business.”
In February, L+R rebranded from its original name of London & Regional Properties to unify its four verticals – hotels, commercial real estate, private credit and ventures – under one entity. The firm has specialized its real estate business in hotels since the late 1990s, and describes itself as the largest privately owned owner and operator of hotels globally, with 130 properties across nine countries amounting to a gross asset value of £7 billion. About half of the 25,000-plus rooms owned by L+R are situated in the UK, 31 percent are in the US and Caribbean and 19 percent are in Continental Europe.
L+R’s existing book combines stabilized hotels operated by its Iconic Hotels & Resorts and Atlas Hotels platforms with a portfolio of lease-based structures including short, unexpired leases; sale-and-leasebacks and ground rents. The London Hilton on Park Lane is among its leased deals.
The goal now is to grow and diversify its revenue base by partnering with – and eventually raising capital directly from – institutional investors to invest in hospitality as well as other long-income commercial real estate opportunities, including sale-and-leaseback transactions, across Europe and the US. To do this, L+R is prioritizing co-investment vehicles, bespoke mandates and joint ventures with third-party capital via three distinct avenues.
Firstly, L+R is looking to invest more in the core-plus space, targeting 10-12 percent IRRs, through club deals with other investors. It aims to acquire and upscale assets in urban city centers.
Secondly, Livingstone says the firm is keen to originate more opportunistic deals in joint ventures targeting IRRs of between 16 and 20 percent. This relates mainly to distressed portfolios and corporate takeovers and ranges from select-service to luxury assets.
Lastly, it is keen to originate more super prime deals in luxury lifestyle and hospitality, targeting luxury resorts in high-end locations, by leveraging the ownership experience and operating expertise gleaned through its existing platforms. “That includes luxury and lifestyle hotels, resorts and hospitality-led assets where there is an opportunity to reposition, rebrand, invest, improve operations or partner with existing owners,” Livingstone says. “We are not simply looking to acquire assets; we are looking for situations where our platform can help unlock the next stage of growth.”
L+R’s ambition bears some resemblance to the journey of Redevco, the Amsterdam headquartered firm which recently evolved from being the specialist asset manager of family owned fashion retail business C&A into a fund manager, closing its debut pan-European fund with €500 million last October. However, a discretionary commingled fund is still some way into the future for L+R, says Livingstone. But when it comes, it could be global in scope. “I would not be surprised if in 24 months our momentum in all these spaces increases to such an extent that we start to think about a global opportunity fund. We’ll have to check back in.”
Pivotal hire
Although L+R has yet to manage other institutions’ capital, it has steadily built up a track record investing off its own balance sheet. The group has invested alongside 12 major institutional partners including pension funds, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds via joint ventures – a history that Livingstone says “most people do not know about.”
These partnerships have included a €1 billion value-add European hotels joint venture with Dutch pension fund PGGM established in 2022 in which L+R acts predominantly as operating partner, as well as a €600 million tie-up in the Nordics with Midstar, a Stockholm-based asset manager. The latter venture was formed last year to acquire and improve hospitality assets across the Nordics.
For Livingstone, this approach has historically proved a more efficient way of investing the group’s capital. But as institutional investors have pulled back from generalist real estate funds in recent years and sought out specialists with operating expertise, “L+R sees an opening to take the natural next step in its own institutionalization,” he says.
The family office’s plans to become “the go-to hotel investment and operating partner” for investors picked up speed when ex Starwood Capital Group’s Cody Bradshaw was appointed group CEO of L+R in September 2024. While he was not given a mandate for third-party management upon starting his role, Bradshaw tells PERE in the same interview that it soon became clear what he needed to do to grow the business.
“When I joined, the founders felt the business had reached enough scale to increasingly incorporate third-party capital,” he explains.
“Upon observing the firm’s global footprint, its 40-year track record, its access to balance sheet capital, I saw potential to grow the firm into more of a global private equity group,” adds Bradshaw, who spent more than a decade as Starwood’s global head of hotel asset management.
Even though L+R is a family office, it has not typically acted like a traditional limited partner, he points out. “The firm has always been an active player and hands-on investor. It prefers to take majority stakes and be in control or co-control position.”
Another of L+R’s distinctive features, Livingstone adds, is its ability to provide both management expertise plus a significant equity contribution far exceeding the usual manager contribution.
“Let’s say we raised £1 billion of equity from third parties. We could put in an approximate 20 percent equity contribution, something that would be a real testament to how much we back our own investments.”
Family approach
Bringing L+R’s sector-specific expertise to new markets is another priority in the group’s plans to expand into third-party capital management. That is why as part of its corporate transformation, the firm opened an office in Madrid in June to expand its activity in Southern Europe. The office is its second outside of the UK and the first in Europe; L+R also has an office in New York.
That same month, the firm appointed Ana Ivanovic as head of origination and capital formation. Based in Madrid, she will lead deal origination, capital formation and strategic partnerships across Europe. Ivanovic spent more than a decade at property consultancy firm JLL advising on hotel transactions across the region.
“It made sense to appoint someone who can help manage those relationships with other family offices and sovereign wealth funds with property platforms in the region,” Livingstone says. “Southern Europe is full of family-owned real estate and hospitality platforms we can partner with to bring solutions to their portfolios.”
Such family-owned portfolios could benefit from access to L+R’s hotel operating platform, or they might be in need of a recapitalization. On behalf of third-party capital L+R would either buy a portfolio outright or buy a stake in it, and then use its operating expertise to help modernize the assets.
After nearly 40 years of investing in property, L+R is entering a new phase in its long history. Having unified the real estate platform and built out its senior team, the firm is poised to bring in its first tranche of third-party capital before year end: it is on track to close on multiple single asset and portfolio transactions across various countries alongside institutional capital partners.
Scaling the platform and courting outside partners could, for some investors, mean shedding the very culture that defined them. But Livingstone is keen for L+R to always remember how it got to where it is today: “We will retain our family office DNA, which will always be at the heart of what we do.”